Local by Social completed its tour across the UK last week, heading to Blackburn for our final edition of the series in the North West. Blackburn with Darwen Council played host at no less than the home of Blackburn Rovers, Ewood Park. The theme this time round was transparency and engagement and, as with all Local by Social events, the day brought together a wide range of experts and enthusiasts from across the fields of innovation, public service and volunteering.
Councillor Kate Hollern kicked things off, stating that “social media has made Blackburn a more engaging council, it’s amazing the amount of ideas that come through from our citizens.” Followed by Tom Stannard, Director of Policy and Communications, who explained that Blackburn is a place of innovation and joined-up working, emphasising that the day was about experimenting and exploring some new questions. It seems to be paying off, as yesterday the council was awarded LGC Council of the Year!
Ingrid Koehler, Improvement Strategist from the LGID, explained the context of these events, particularly referencing the events theme around transparency, and the importance of making data meaningful. (You can hear more from Ingrid in our quick wrap up chat at the bottom of the blog).
Tim Cheetham, provided an insightful presentation, asking not only what role open data played in his work as a local politician, but also how open data could be useful to the citizens he represents. We managed to grab a quick chat over lunch – it’s only five minutes long and well worth a listen:
Dominic Campbell from FutureGov wrapped the preliminaries up by putting all this progress into context and sharing innovative examples of gov 2.0 in action, including a top tweeting Mayor and making gov 2.0 meaningful.
Our speed talks followed, with people from inside and outside government speaking about their involvement in exciting engagement and transparency projects:
- Amanda Coleman and Kevin Hoy from Greater Manchester Police shared with us their experiences on the #gmp24 project – an idea (from the Chief Executive no less) to tweet every action that the police took in 24 hours. The results were remarkable, pushing their followers up to 18,000, achieved nationwide press coverage and inspired the equally remarkable #Walsall24, in which Walsall Council tweeted their actions over a day (which you can read about more here).
- Tanya Ashworth, Communications officer from Preston City Council spoke about their nifty use of social media inside the Council on a day-to-day basis, from opening the conversation on Facebook to using tools such as Ustream to broadcast council meetings. It was impressive to see a council taking a sensible ‘use what’s out there’ approach that is beginning to transform their relationship with the citizens of Preston.
- Up next, Mike Rawlins from Talk About Local, who gave a down-to-earth talk about the benefits and limitations of social media practice. You can watch his full presentation, and his write up of his Local by Social experience here.
- Joseph Stashko continued the local theme, filling attendees in on Blog Preston and its future as one of the winning projects of the NESTA Neighbourhood Challange, as part of Prescap. A refreshing insight that balanced stories and journalistic pieces alongside content that is simply useful for the local community (wifi hotspots being a popular post), with a commitment to deliver material in partnership with the community, you can watch his presentation in full here.
- Andrew Wilson completed the talks by telling us all about Who Owns My Neigbourhood? a service that helps local people take responsibility for the land, buildings and activities where they live and work. The site enables people find out who owns what and how buildings and spaces could be better used for the benefit of the community.
With the talks triggering questions and potential answers, we asked participants to get thinking about what they would like to change for Blackburn’s communities and council. Participants scribbled their bright ideas on post its (perhaps the most we’ve seen in the entire series!) and the Local by Social team scrambled the ideas into ten or so themes for groups to form around.
Teams set, we all got to work to take a bright idea into a project full of potential, wrapping up with a show and tell at the end of the day to share progress. Projects spanned the board, impressively covering citizen engagement and organisation transparency from lots of different angles, which nicely reflected the diversity of attendees. Over ten projects were presented, and here’s just a few to give you an idea of the work created that afternoon – if we haven’t yet received your project presentation feel free to send through and we’ll make sure we share it with the Local by Social community to help make it happen…
FOI Exchanger
Ever wanted to find out about something in your organisation but worried about your position? The FOI Exchanger aims to allow people ‘swap’ requests, remaining anonymous…
Cut the Crap
Potholes, dustbins, dog poop… classic examples of the problems councils deal with on a day to day basis. How can we tackle the problems in a better way, as well as go some way to stop them happening in the first place?
Print10
An idea from Tanya, a communications officer at Preston City Council. The funding for the council newspaper has been completely cut, leaving many concerned about those who might not be able to reach the information online. Print10 is a project that aims to help communities distribute the magazine in partnership with the council…
Housing Conditions
How do you go about reporting a housing problem? How do you know if a problem has already been noted? What’s the difference between wear and tear and plain negligence? This team looked into how the web might be able to help share this knowledge and encourage others to contribute…
Citizen surgery
How do you get people to come along to councillors’ surgeries? This project explored going to where the people where having the conversations off and online, as well as redefining surgeries as a more fluid concept, that could be shaped by communities…
Wrapping up…
As its probably clear to see, last Friday was jam packed with inspiration, conversations and action. After a few days to reflect on how everything went we caught up with Ingrid to chat about what she made of the day, how she sees the projects moving forward and her future hopes for Local by Social…
So now we’ve parked the Local by Social tour bus (ok, we didn’t have one, but that would of been pretty cool) for a little while, we’d like to say a huge thank you to Blackburn and Darwen, as well as all our host cities. Last week demonstrated how willing people are to bring their energy and enthusiasm by the bucket load – and often stepping outside their comfort zone. The results? Some really important new thinking being shared, connections being established and projects, with futures, being created.
Love the concept and interested in the range of ideas and solutions generated. Specifically I am interested in talking with the creators/authors of ‘Cut the crap’. We have been experimenting / trialling / thinking about those issues. This includes bar coding litter/dog bins to monitor usage, mapping bin locations and SMS texting messaging interactive GIF files. We are also using bluetooth to broadcast messages like this: http://www.northlincs.gov.uk/northlincs/videos/dogfouling/DF_1.htm It was the ‘Hopscotch’ synergy that sparked interest. We have done a lot of work on dog fouling / dog control orders -education – and would be interested to share and possibly take further. So would be grateful if you can get in touch. Thanks Twitter @AdeCapon from North Lincs.
(Disclosure, I work for LGID)
Well done Ingrid and colleagues on putting on what look to have been really interesting and exciting events. It’s great to see so many innovative ideas coming out of one day (and a good way of getting report back from events).